Artificial intelligence powers marketing

Marketing is undergoing dramatic change, driven by shifts in technology and the availability of digital data. Among the most significant changes is the heightened ability for marketers to discern what customers and potential buyers care about and then act on that information.

Marketers today are watching as buyers leave digital tracks – the web pages they view, buttons they press on mobile devices, comments they leave on Facebook or Twitter. By observing how consumers act, marketers can learn what buyers care about and what is important to them.

By aggregating this digital data, and applying the right algorithms, marketers can recommend products, deliver interesting offers, and create personalization to segments of one rather than to batches of thousands.

Machine learning is well-suited to this type of data aggregation, analysis, and recommendation. To learn more about the role of artificial intelligence in marketing, I spoke with two experts. Sameer Patel is the CEO of Kahuna Software, and Andrew Eichenbaum is Kahuna’s head of science.

This conversation was episode 209 of the CXOTALK series of discussions with the world’s most important and prolific innovators.

If you care about the future of marketing, AI, and machine learning, then dig into this discussion.

Watch the video embedded above and read an edited transcript below. Or hop over to CXOTALK and check out a complete transcript from the entire 45-minute conversation.

What is Kahuna Software?

Kahuna software is a B2C marketing automation provider. We have built a real-time platform that allows brands to be able to understand the interests and preferences of their consumers. Literally within seconds, and put meaningful offers in front of them. This is the new way of using artificial intelligence to engage with your consumers on the right device at the right time.

We look at convergence and the need for consumer brands to rethink how they engage and transact with the consumers.

We’re in this new era, where you can market to anybody, probably 14-16 hours a day. People are that connected to their cell phone, it’s always there, there are multiple channels to reach out to them, and that’s all through one device. This connectivity has become ubiquitous, at least in the US market, over the past five years.

Now that being said, it’s easy enough to spam them, and nobody wants to do that because people have become hypersensitive to spam. So, it’s not just not sending them spam; it’s knowing what to send them when to send to them, how you send to them because there’s a range of things. What message do you want to send to them? And, it just extends out.

We’re now in an area where we can think about trying to increase the expected long-term value of all my customers. I want to increase their overall engagement stake, and this is what marketers can now reach to. It was a nebulous goal before but is now something we can move forward and try and act on.

Is this just marketing automation?

Marketing automation was created a decade ago. How does stack up? The market’s over ten billion dollars in size, yet there is over two hundred and eighty billion dollars of goods left in abandoned shopping carts every single year. Two hundred eighty billion dollars.

That’s how much you and I go, and we almost buy, and we put it in the shopping cart, and we leave it there. You’re effectively nudging the consumer to the finish line, or providing them with handholding, information and research that might persuade them to finish buying.

The conversion rates are 2-3% on e-commerce. That’s how bad it is. All this investment in what seemed like the right offers lead to 2-3% of conversion.